Re-thinking rural-amenity ecologies for environmental management in the Anthropocene

The migration of lifestyle-orientated landholders (amenity migrants) to rural landscapes is resulting in the production of new rural ecologies. To date, the future implications of these ecologies for environmental management have been framed largely in ‘traditional’ conservation biology terms, focusing on how we can conserve or restore natural environments to a past ecological benchmark. However, the Anthropocene provides an opportunity to critically examine how we can progress environmental management in a way that locates ecologies as emergent products of human–environment interaction through time. We extend from Tim Ingold’s work on wayfaring to position people and plants in environmental management as cohabitants who are traversing a world that is continually in the making. We conducted qualitative research in the hinterlands of Melbourne, Australia, involving narrative interviews with landholders and walking their property with them, using a form of participant observation called the ‘walkabout’ method. We found that the conservation aspirations of amenity migrants were mediated by the landscape histories that were embodied in the plants they engaged with on their property. These embodied landscape histories served to structure the trajectory of ecological emergence in which landholders were a part. We develop the concept of ‘landscape legacy’ to explain how past actions and future aspirations come together in management practice to produce novel and often unanticipated ecologies. Landscape legacy grounds the Anthropocene in everyday environments, capturing the need to progress environmental management as a wild experiment in rural-amenity landscapes, focusing on ecological form, function, relationship and process.     

Situating the Anthropocene: planetary urbanization and the anthropological machine

The anthropological machine is the discursive framework, the dispositif that grounds “Western man” in a sense of civility, secured through a violent division within and between the human and nonhuman: not the after-effect of the civilizing act but its very foundation. This paper explores Agamben’s machine at multiple sites: in its expression in everyday lives of urban citizens, and its legitimation of capitalist urbanization on broader spatial and temporal scales, its “worlding” through planetary urbanization and normalization of climate change. Complicit in capitalist urbanization and climate change, the anthropological machine has acted as a “switch point” since the 1600s. It now frames an emergent response: triage as the inevitable sacrifice of some peoples and parts of the planet to preserve others. If the urban is to become the site of mondialization, confronting the apparent inevitability of triage we must think beyond the either-or of a people or a planet. Thought in relation to the urban, the anthropological machine offers a meeting ground between urban political economy and assemblage urbanism. It enables us to situate the Anthropocene and differentiate the urban. But it also exposes a deep divide between scholars reframing the human beyond “Western man”: between those for whom the more-than-human expresses the dreams of a biophilic city and those for whom the less-than-human is increasingly its living nightmare.     

Rapid 20th century environmental change on northeastern Baffin Island,Arctic Canada inferred from a multi-proxy lacustrine record

The Arctic has a disproportionately large response to changes in radiative forcing of climate, and arctic lacustrine ecosystems respond sensitively to these changes. The goal of this research is to generate high-resolution climate records for the past two millennia using multiple proxies in order to place 20th and 21st century climate and environmental change into a long-term context. We use a ¹⁴C- and ²¹⁰Pb-dated surface core from Lake CF8 on northeastern Baffin Island, Arctic Canada to generate a high-resolution multiproxy reconstruction of climate and environmental change. Throughout the late Holocene, primary productivity in Lake CF8 was low, but increased almost 20-fold in the past 200 years. Insect (Chironomidae) assemblages also show dramatic changes since 1950 AD, with cold stenothermous chironomid taxa disappearing from the record altogether. These changes in productivity and chironomid assemblages are unprecedented in the past 5,000 years. The dramatic ecological shifts that occurred at Lake CF8 have also been observed elsewhere in the Arctic, and will likely continue at ever-increasing rates as anthropogenic inputs of green house gases continue to cause climate warming and enhanced lacustrine primary production.     

第四纪科学发展展望

第四纪科学是地球科学的一个分支.20世纪中国第四纪研究的发展历史,可以分为两个阶段:1909～1949年,强调理论研究与实际应用的结合,适当地采用"全盘西化"的办法,将中国与世界先进的差距,由100年缩短为50年,跨越了一大步;1950～2000年,在完成国家需求的鼓励下,适当地越过经典研究范畴,参与环境问题和全球变化的研究,使得中国第四纪科学追赶了50年的差距.在21世纪开始之时,中国与国际第四纪研究的步伐有前有后,但基本上是站在同一起跑线上.对21世纪的第四纪研究,作者提出了以"研究过去只是为了未来"和"地学的文艺复兴在呼唤未来"为题的两个思路,从1)以人为本--务实社会需求;2)地球和人类共同的历史--人与自然和谐;3)我们需要自己提出理论--一种科学文化;4)群众需要第四纪--极大地提高人民的素质等4个方面展望了中国第四纪研究的新形势.     

The End of Sustainability

It is time to move past the concept of sustainability. The realities of the Anthropocene warrant this conclusion. They include unprecedented and irreversible rates of human-induced biodiversity loss, exponential increases in per-capita resource consumption, and global climate change. These factors combine to create an increasing likelihood of rapid, nonlinear, social and ecological regime changes. The recent failure of the Rio + 20 provides an opportunity to collectively reexamine—and ultimately move past—the concept of sustainability as an environmental goal. We must face the impossibility of defining—let alone pursuing—a goal of “sustainability” in a world characterized by such extreme complexity, radical uncertainty and lack of stationarity. After briefly examining sustainability's failure, we propose resilience thinking as one possible new orientation and point to the challenges associated with translating resilience theory into policy application.     

Anthropocene dwelling: Lessons from post-disaster Christchurch

This article takes circumstances of post-quake Christchurch as an analogue for Anthropocene emergency. I argue that Christchurch events are more than a reminder of the Earth's geologic volatility; for the Anthropocene-as-disaster, it is a prompt to contemplate what it is to dwell on unstable ground. Urban locations—towns, cities, mega-cities—are all rendered vulnerable on the surface of an unruly planet, offering no absolute refuge from planetary fluctuations. Such unsettling is deeply felt, physically and psychologically, resulting in homelessness both literal and figurative. Ensuing analysis offers insight into potential strategies for unsettled planetary dwelling to come.     

Sustainable development and anthropogenic induced geomorphic hazards in subsiding areas

In many areas of the world, subsidence related to the lowering of the water table is modifying the landscape and provoking costly environmental hazards. We consider the Dead Sea (the Earth's lowest lake) as a model. Its water level was 395 m bMSL in the 1960s. Due to water diversions in the catchment area, as of 2016, the level has dropped to about 430 m bMSL. Here, as in other parts of the Anthropocene world, from China, to Iran, to Turkey, to Canada and the United States, consequences of human interventions are rapidly modifying the environment. Aggressive geomorphic processes leading to accelerated degradations are taking place and affecting landforms and infrastructures. In Tectonic terms, the lake is a pull‐apart basin resulting from the motion of the Dead Sea Transform fault. Since the 1960s, a slice of brine of about 35 km³ has been lost. The water table is dropping more rapidly in the lake than in the coastal zone creating an ever‐increasing head difference. Consequently, groundwater moves towards the sea to compensate for the imbalance, provoking the reactivation of the area's paleo‐channels with subsidence, sinkholes, and landslides. Since the 1980s, industrial‐touristic infrastructure has covered newly emerging lands in geomorphic hazards‐prone areas of the coastal zone. Time series analysis of high to very high resolution visible/radar satellite images acquired from the 1970s to present, revealed major landscape evolution. Such dynamic systems prevailing in recent decades permitted the study of human/environment interactions to help minimize their effects. Major deformations of an industrial dike were analysed and quantified. The results underline the necessity in the Anthropocene of careful analysis of relevant data sources acquired before and during subsidence, particularly in karst topography zones and prior to the development of major human activities in economically appealing environments around the world. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Climatization of environmental degradation: a widespread challenge to the integrity of earth science

ABSTRACT

To guide scientists and society regarding the hydrologic consequences of anthropogenic climate change, earth scientists increasingly develop qualitative predictions and quantitative ensembles of models, some of which have important economic or (geo)political implications. However, with unprecedented human population, environmental degradation, and water scarcity, climatic factors are increasingly invoked falsely to explain failures of environmental governance, a phenomenon termed climatization. We propose a first typology of climatization in hydrology. Scientific climatization occurs when – during the normal course of a scientific investigation – a hydrologic state is falsely attributed to climatic factors, often due to a conceptual model that excludes human impacts or a simplified methodology that fails to quantify uncertainty. In contrast, securitization-aligned climatization occurs when a securitizing state actor requires that scientists attribute observed hydrologic states to climatic factors. Maintaining the credibility of earth science requires that earth scientists vigorously contest both scientific climatization and securitization of global change hydrology.     

开展“人类世”环境研究,做新时代地学的开拓者——纪念黄汲清先生的地学创新精神

第四纪环境这门科学,是地质学的一个横截面,是地质历史时期的最新一章,它是一门探索时间的科学。环境问题是关系人类社会的全面问题和应当涉及的人类未来的现实问题,它要求第四纪环境工作者思考自己的科学问题时具有强烈的社会意识。所以它又是一门属于人的科学。从国际上看,“Science”和“Nature”两杂志都在2003年度的科学进展中把环境中古气候变化研究列为年度的进展。而在国内,从1999～2003年5年来地质大调查取得了一系列重大的阶段性成果,其中有10个方面成果具有划时代的意义。其中4项是直接与第四纪环境有关。地质学目前正在进行学术上的转型,从单一的地质问题研究向综合的地球系统科学研究转变,从主要提供资源保障向资源和环境保障并重转变。这种转变把第四纪环境研究从学术水平上被提升到社会需求水平。这要求它积极考虑最近诺贝尔奖获得者P.J.Crutzen等科学家所提出的“人类世(Anthropocene)”这一新的研究方向。作者提出,“人类世(Anthropocene)”是研究大约10000年以来人类活动和自然环境构成的地球系统的变化及适应的可持续发展性。这一研究在中国已有了很好的基础和开端,但还不能满足当前国家发展的需求,所以第四纪环境工作者还应像开拓者一样,不断努力     

Aerosol transmission of human pathogens: From miasmata to modern viral pandemics and their preservation potential in the Anthropocene record

Ongoing uncertainty over the relative importance of aerosol transmission of COVID-19 is in part rooted in the history of medical science and our understanding of how epidemic diseases can spread through human populations. Ancient Greek medical theory held that such illnesses are transmitted by airborne pathogenic emanations containing particulate matter (“miasmata”). Notable Roman and medieval scholars such as Varro, Ibn al-Khatib and Fracastoro developed these ideas, combining them with early germ theory and the concept of contagion. A widely held but vaguely defined belief in toxic miasmatic mists as a dominant causative agent in disease propagation was overtaken by the science of 19th century microbiology and epidemiology, especially in the study of cholera, which was proven to be mainly transmitted by contaminated water. Airborne disease transmission came to be viewed as burdened by a dubious historical reputation and difficult to demonstrate convincingly. A breakthrough came with the classic mid-20th century work of Wells, Riley and Mills who proved how expiratory aerosols (their “droplet nuclei”) could transport still-infectious tuberculosis bacteria through ventilation systems. The topic of aerosol transmission of pathogenic respiratory diseases assumed a new dimension with the mid-late 20th century “Great Acceleration” of an increasingly hypermobile human population repeatedly infected by different strains of zoonotic viruses, and has taken centre stage this century in response to outbreaks of new respiratory infections that include coronaviruses. From a geoscience perspective, the consequences of pandemic-status diseases such as COVID-19, produced by viral pathogens utilising aerosols to infect a human population currently approaching 8 billion, are far-reaching and unprecedented. The obvious and sudden impacts on for example waste plastic production, water and air quality and atmospheric chemistry are accelerating human awareness of current environmental challenges. As such, the “anthropause” lockdown enforced by COVID-19 may come to be seen as a harbinger of change great enough to be preserved in the Anthropocene stratal record.